Sunday, October 2, 2016

20th Sunday after Pentecost

If
I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

I
wonder how many of you winced or even revolted at the last verse of
our Psalm this morning. It contains a grisly and unsettling image:
blessed shall he be
that taketh thy children, and throweth them against the stones. I
hope none is more scandalized by these words than by the actual
suffering of children in our time. No matter what your view of
abortion is—whether it is an absolute evil that should be outlawed
or a necessary evil that should be allowed but carefully regulated—I
wonder if we wince more at these words than the approximately 700,000
abortions in the United States every year. I also wonder how much we
wince at the plight of children made refugees by the Syrian civil
war. Many were moved by the recent photograph of a Syrian child
caught in the midst of that civil war, but such tenderness can often
stall at just sympathy and not translate into action. I'm not saying
that you were wrong to wince at the Psalm if
you did—I'll
admit it is a portion of Scripture that in the course of the monthly
reading of the Psalms, I often wince at—I'm just wondering if we
are more sensitive to the words found in the Bible than of the myriad
of actual sufferings in this world? That
is a
question only you as an individual can answer.

But
before
we start getting too upset about the Psalm, we need to ask the who,
what, when, where, and why. Answering these questions will help us
understand the Psalm, which in turn, will help us to understand how
it might relate to us today. The Psalm is set in the period
around the Babylonian exile.
Next to the Exodus, the most important event in the Old Testament is
the Exile which occurred in 586BC. The Babylonians conquered the
rebelling
Jews in Judah. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar,
destroyed
the capital
city of Jerusalem,
tore down its walls and razed its temple. Afterward,
many were carried
into exile,
nearly a thousand miles away in Babylon on the banks of the river
Euphrates. The people not only lost their home, they lost their sense
of autonomy with the execution of the their king
and his sons. They
also
felt cut off from God because
God had told them that the one place to worship
was in the temple. The Psalm opens with a statement of the sadness of
the people in exile, By
the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee,
O Sion. Sion
of course is the name of the hill on which the temple had been built
in Jerusalem. Here is a people that is downcast and dejected, and to
compound the matter, the captors, the Babylonians,
wanted them to sing and make music. To put this is more direct terms,
this would be like asking a Southerner to sing the national anthem in
1865 or more a
trivial illustration,
you being asked to attend and
cheer
at a parade for the winner of a sports championship for a team whom
you despise. The exiles hang
up their harps and
ask
themselves, how
shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
In the closing verses of the Psalm, we hear
their
sadness well up into anger and a desire for revenge.
First they renounce the Edomites, a neighboring nation to Judah, who
apparently watched with glee the downfall of an old foe. Then comes
the curse on the Babylonians and on their children. In
the
horrible eighteen month siege
of Jerusalem, the Bible reports that some resorted to cannibalism,
and
the
prophet Jeremiah had
warned that
I [the
Lord] will make
them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one
another's flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the
enemies who seek their lives
(Jeremiah 19:9). The
speaker in the Psalm merely wants what happened to the Jews to happen
to the Babylonians. That being said, I
would submit to you that the anger and revenge we see evidenced here
is not a noble or godly emotion, but one that reflects a genuine
human
emotion. This is one of the brilliant things about the Psalms in that
it shows the full range of human emotions. One cannot really condone
the anger here, but one can at least understand it after taking
account of
what the what
the people
endured in the siege
of Jerusalem and the
exile
to Babylon.

So,
why, you might be asking, does it matter and what does it have to do
with my life? Well, according to the traditional understanding of the
Psalms, there is an additional layer of meaning. There is the
historical meaning I've been describing, and then there is the
allegorical or typological reading. In this reading, for example,
Jerusalem containing
king and temple for God's people
would be understood as
the
kingdom of God. Hence, St. Paul can talk about the heavenly
Jerusalem, where our true citizenship belongs, and which is, as he
says, the mother of us all. Furthermore, Babylon, the place away from
Jerusalem, would be understood as this world and the time of this
mortal life in
which we long for the life of heaven, for
Jerusalem.
Such a reading of the Psalm is reflected in the (Offertory/Gospel)
hymn this morning. The second to last stanza reads,

Now,
in the meantime, with hearts raised on high,we
for that country must yearn and must sigh,seeking
Jerusalem, dear native land,through
our long exile on Babylon's strand.

In
the language of the New Testament, we are living in exile
in
Babylon waiting to be taken back to our true home, Jerusalem. We live
in Babylon, but we don't live in quite the same way as the sons and
daughters of that
city of the world live.
But, my friends, and here is the rub, just like those exiles of long
ago, Christians
can be overwhelmed by anger and revenge for a world that
is broken in so many ways. We can
be angry
because life and society have let us down.
We can
be angry because when we look at the world we see much insanity. The
truth is that
it
is all too easy to get
fed up with the world, and retreat into our own religious or cultural
safe-havens.
I'm here to tell you that it is okay to be frustrated and it is
probably even okay to be angry at the insanity you see in the world,
but we can't let it get the best of us. Our
Lord tells us to bless them that curse you, that you may be children
of your father in heaven.
The Psalmist can't bring himself to sing the Lord's song in a strange
land, but I believe this is precisely what we are supposed to do.
While
we live on
Babylon's
strand waiting to go to Jerusalem our dear native land,
let
us sing the Lord's song in this strange land, a
song of the Lord's goodness and justice and
love.